Musk, who is no stranger to muzzling critics of Himself, was immediately lionized by the MAGA cult of bigots and antisemites as a bold defender of “free speech” and a bazillion bots and bigots immediately flooded the zone with calls to punish advertisers who were libeled as “enemies of free speech” by a slew of rather suspiciously identical tweets:
(Note to the Herd of Independent Minds: there is no such thing as “The Colbert Show”. It’s called “Late Night with Stephen Colbert”. If you are going to cut and paste your Heroic Stand, you should at least give your fellow cultists decent contact info.)
Now, here’s thing…. well, several things really.
First, “free speech” means one thing and one thing only: that the state has no right to regulate speech. That’s it. That’s all. It has nothing at all to do with who advertisers have to support. If a bunch of companies are horrified by Elon Musk’s naked antisemitism and platforming of Nazis and white supremacists, they are perfectly free to refuse to advertise with him. That’s not an impingement of Musk’s free speech. It’s an affirmation of the right of sponsors to not have to affirm a rich bigot by being associated with him. In short, it’s an affirmation of their free speech rights.
Second, if you, as a monstrous supporter of Nazi propaganda, want to defend a swine like Musk, you are free to burn up your own soul for the sake of the dwindling readership of your Twitfeed. The fact that nobody wants to read what you have to say is not an impingement of your free speech. It is an affirmation of the right of Normals to treat you like the moral leper you are.
Third, O MAGA antisemitic moron, judging you by your own lights, which apparently include the idea that everybody is somehow morally obligated to make room for every opinion on earth to be given a forum, where is the sense or sanity of you calling for those advertisers you are mad at to be cancelled, silenced and boycotted? Very clearly, you have no interest in free speech. You just demand that bigots like yourself be mollycoddled and your enemies be silenced. You want authoritarian tyranny, not free speech. You are, in a word, a liar in a cult that has, for years, used accusation as your primary form of confession.
And the proof of this, of course, is that at the very same time your evil cult is lying about the supposed “assault on Elon Musk’s free speech rights” your orange messiah is demanding that the full might of the state be brought to bear on destroying the free speech rights of his critics:
This really is a call for the state to be weaponized against the first amendment and therefore really is a war on free speech–and the Cult is perfectly fine with it.
Vote this evil authoritarian party at war with our Constitutional order out of office in every election–local, state, and federal–till it is gone. They are the gravest threat to our Republic since the Confederacy. In power, they will be a grave threat to the human race.
Advertisement
6 Responses
This is perhaps a nitpick, but: Free Speech doesn’t mean only that the government can’t censor you. You’re thinking of the First Amendment. There are offenses against the basic human right the First Amendment is designed to protect that aren’t necessarily violations of the First Amendment itself.
You know, like identifying a website that’s being used as a digital public square, buying it, and censoring everyone who tries to use it to say something you don’t like. That kind of thing.
Speaking of nitpicks, MSNBC is a cable channel. It’s not using the government-regulated airwaves, which aren’t free anyway: It’s almost $5k just to apply for a construction permit. Chump change for a big company, but still far from free. Gosh, you’d think Trump wasn’t concerned with factual accuracy or something.
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-353919A1.pdf if anyone’s interested.
Close, but I’d offer some refinements…
(1) “…“free speech” means one thing and one thing only: that the state has no right to regulate speech. That’s it. That’s all.”
No, because it also means you don’t get beaten up or assaulted for what you have said. Otherwise police officers could simply swap their uniforms for civvies (or rely on self-anointed goons like the Proud Boys) before they smashed your printing press.
Outside the US, free speech debate tends to be (thankfully) less fixated on the textual and historical contours of the First Amendment and more on the basic idea of “within certain very broad limits, people make better-quality decisions the more of the evidence and arguments for and against they are able to hear.”
Yes, it DOES mean that free speech is not violated if other people are just exercising their own right to speak by criticising you. Mark is 100% right on that point.
(2) Consequences. Yes, reckless or malicious speech (whether illegal or not) should face consequences. But which consequences? The highest form of response should be one that tries to persuade the person to mend their ways. If that doesn’t work, the next best step is to persuade others not to follow the miscreant. In the last resort, if the speech is actually illegal (ie, goes beyond persuasion into threats, blackmail, crime-facilitation) then coercion and/or violence may be justified. But ideally this should be an orderly process coordinated by the state, with due process, and after very clear warnings to repent, rather than depending on whichever vigilante happens to reach the speaker first.
[ctd] (3) Boycotts. Up to a point these represent other people making their own decisions (“I choose not to place my orders with a business that [invests in apartheid regimes/ bans unions/ refuses to serve gay people” – yes, left-wingers, “shut up and do your job” may well bite you one day too, thought of that?) and exercising their own free speech rights to persuade others to make the same decision (“Did you know this business has dirty hands beneath its squeaky-clean PR image?).
However, boycotts can be abused, too, in several ways.
(i) Obviously if the organisers lie or distort the reason for it (“Procter & Gamble’s symbol is Satanist!”), that’s outside the normal scope of free speech from the start, since it’s usually defined ex ante to exclude telling deliberate falsehoods about identifiable individuals.
(ii) Also, if the boycott is coordinated and enforced via coercion, that’s also clearly outside the bounds of “free speech.”
(iii) Those two tactics, however, would be clearly illegal. The trickier question arises when the boycott promoters aren’t outright lying, or threatening “snitches get stitches” to allies who don’t toe the line, but instead are appealing to tribal or group solidarity to rally the troops (“You went to see LIFE OF BRIAN? I thought you were a genuine Catholic!”). They don’t respect the right of others in their group to make up their own mind. And to be fair, others in the group may abdicate their duty to consider the other side fairly and just blindly “pile on.” (“Someone told me that someone told me that someone told me that some Christian woman one town away in Pakistan insulted The Prophet. Let’s go burn her house down.”) Social media abets this by making it easier to like, promote, etc with only a second’s thought.
In this case a boycott is an abuse of power. Ten thousand people ceasing to patronise your business no longer represents a “jury” of ten thousand separate individuals weighing up your case and deciding against you. It just means that group has ten thousand members whom its more enraged members can mobilise. This isn’t justice. It’d mean you can insult Tuvaluans or Sammarinesi with impunity but don’t dare say anything negative about China or India.
That said, for legal purposes drawing a line between “considered arguments” and ”inflamed tribal loyalty” would be quite tricky.
(iv) The nature of social media – inadvertently – makes even measured criticism more painful. Someone says or writes something stupid. Before 2005, it might have been read or heard by a dozen people, probably known to the author, and one or two may have said “Not cool, man, do better”. At the worst, pre-internet, for most people the worst they could do to embarrass themselves, audience size-wise, was on talkback radio or in a college newspaper.
Now that the internet means potentially most of the eight thousand million people on the planet can read and screenshot your unfiltered thoughts, they can also reply and criticise. In each separate case this is an exercise of their own free speech. Multiplied by thousands, however, this becomes quite crushing. Seeing screens full of strangers criticising you – even if everything they write is carefully phrased, not threats to violence – could push a lot of people into depression, even suicide. Each individual contributor becomes like the apocryphal letter to the editor complaining about “I drove over to see the house where the murder occurred, and was disgusted at the large crowd who had turned up to gawk at it.” A stoning, remember, is lethal even if an individual rock is not, because a stoning multiplies that individual rock by a large crowd.
And then, of course, after the seven hundredth complete stranger has explained carefully to you that you are a bad person, you start getting supporters who tell you that You’re A Victim Of Cancel Culture, that your critics Just Can’t Handle The Truth and What Are You Trying To Hide… do you think you’ll look that closely at your newfound friends?
[end rant]